Trading Operations Engineer

The Trading Operations Production Support Engineering team is the steward of Optiver’s trading systems, balancing a safe, orderly production environment with profitability and sustainable growth.

Our responsibility is to stay ahead of the inherent complexity in rapidly scaling a distributed system that trades many classes of financial instruments across dozens of exchanges and thousands of servers - all the while striving for simplicity, stability, and operational excellence.

Our team understands the full breadth of all production systems, including how they interconnect and interact and use this knowledge to deploy, monitor, troubleshoot, and scale up our trading infrastructure. We work with traders, development teams and operations teams to coordinate and influence improvements to our systems. 

Who we are:

Optiver is a tech-driven trading firm and leading global market maker. As one of the oldest market making institutions, we are a trusted partner of 70+ exchanges across the globe. Our mission is to constantly improve the market by injecting liquidity, providing accurate pricing, increasing transparency and acting as a stabilizing force no matter the market conditions. With a focus on continuous improvement, we participate in the safeguarding of healthy and efficient markets for everyone who participates.

Optiver Chicago’s culture parallels the energetic city we’re immersed in. Home to the Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Board Options Exchange, and Chicago Mercantile Exchange, Chicago has established itself as the trading capital of the US. Active on leading US exchanges, Optiver’s Chicago office trades a wide range of products from listed derivatives to cash equities, ETFs, bonds and foreign exchange.

What you’ll do:

• Deploy, maintain, and monitor a suite of proprietary trading applications.
• Provide technical expertise and support to a high frequency trading floor in a competitive market-making environment.
• Develop fluency with existing systems, infrastructure, and procedures, and proactively work to improve them.
• Work with development to set standards ensuring the long-term health and stability of the production trading environment, even in extreme conditions.
• Support and coordinate deployments of new trading products, trading systems, exchanges, and datacenters.
• Intelligently automate our system management tooling while maintaining firm human control.

Who you are:

• You are a pragmatic, logical thinker.
• You have a collaborative and positive attitude.
• You can stay composed and even thrive in intense, high-pressure environments.
• You notice when workflows have room to be improved, and strive to find clean and simple ways to make them more efficient.
• You are naturally curious about hardware and software, and how these interact.
• You want to work on a broad range of projects and are highly organized in keeping track of concurrent responsibilities while keeping stakeholders informed.
• You can look at code, figure out how it works, and explore how to make it better.
• You are able to clearly explain your thoughts through written and verbal communication, ask insightful questions, and are not afraid to challenge or defend a strategy. 
• You seek out opportunities to leave your comfort zone and enjoy frequent change.

Skillset:

• A background in managing day-to-day operations of software and hardware infrastructure.
• Strong design, debugging, and problem solving skills.
• Experience with operating systems (especially Unix/Linux) and an understanding of networking fundamentals and protocols.
• Experience with Python or similar scripting language for automating tasks.
• Experience with relational databases (we largely use PostgreSQL but welcome experience with any other database).
• Prior experience working in the trading industry is a plus, but is not a requirement.

What you’ll get:

• Work alongside best-in-class professionals from over 40 different countries.
• Performance based bonus structure that is unmatched anywhere in the industry. We combine our profits across desks, teams and offices into a global profit pool fostering a truly collaborative environment to work in.
• Ownership over initiatives that directly solve business problems. 

Alongside this you will get great other benefits such as 25 paid vacation days and market holidays, fully paid health insurance, daily breakfast and lunch, training opportunities, 401(k) match up to 50% and charitable match opportunities, regular social events and clubs, and many more.

At Optiver, we are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment of mutual respect. Optiver recruits, employs, trains, compensates and promotes regardless of race, religion, color, sex, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, physical or mental disability, or other legally protected characteristics.